"I feel very confident, overall, as we sit here seven months from this date change," said Corrigan, chairman of the SIA's Y2K contingency planning committee. "But you can't ignore the problems, as remote as they may be."

The Y2K computer problem stems from glitches that can arise in older computers and software programs which only allow two digits for the year. Unless the systems are fixed or replaced, the year 2000 may be read as 1900, causing computers to crash or spew out bad data.

The financial sector is one of the best prepared of any to face Y2K and US financial companies are further ahead than any in the world.

Investor confidence, Corrigan said, is also stronger than it was six to nine months ago. He gave the example of an abatement in trades to try and exploit changes in interest rates that might occur as a result of the Year 2000 rollover.

The report, which took over six months to prepare, also serves as a blow-by-blow troubleshooting guide for top executives in the wholesale securities industry. It is not aimed at the retail market or the army of small private investors known as day traders, Corrigan said.

Perhaps the greatest uncertainty facing big securities companies lies in the ability of financial institutions outside the G7 group of nations to handle the date change, he said. But he cited examples in which exchanges reconciled trades manually during calamities such as a 30-hour computer failure at the Bank of New York in 1985.

"If you reach the point where a market or an exchange has to be closed, it's not the end of the world," he added.

Corrigan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said he did not expect there to be "any meaningful slowdown" in business activity around the New Year. He did, however, say there would be a distribution change as companies schedule important trades away from the critical 10 days on either side of 31 December.

Corrigan said securities firms would be working to maintain liquidity in the last 10 days of December and the first 10 days of January, to give them flexibility in dealing with potential Y2K problems.